In a RUT

The ratio of my joy to our achievement is disproportionately high - we managed to get our Chilean tax numbers (RUT) by ourselves! Our crappy Spanish works! We need an RUT to buy a campervan so had been reading up on the procedure. This page was really helpful. This is the form we had to fill in.

We walked down to our local tax office and said we wanted to get a RUT. They gave us the form we needed and the woman marked the fields we needed to fill in. Then we went to get a queue ticket. There was a guy at the machine who got you the appropriate ticket for what you wanted to do.

Not much of a queue at the tax office

At the desk, I hardly had to say anything after I'd told the dude I was after a RUT. Although Paul's woman got a bit confused over what country he was from - Great Britain or United Kingdom (?!) - and came over to ask my guy (United Kingdom)... We got our RUT numbers in a matter of minutes.

Huzzah!

It was free and the whole process probably took about half an hour, including me having to ask for a new form because I put down the expiry date of my passport instead of my date of birth. We've both got an app on our phone called Word Lens (£2.99 and doesn't need data) which was really helpful for working out what the form said. You just hold it over the words and it translates instantly. Not always 100% accurate, but good enough to work out what's what.

Paul is still feeling lethargic, but slowly getting better. Next week is mostly public holiday for Independence Day on Wednesday and we won't be able to make much progress with campervan shopping, so he might as well rest while he can.

Weather-wise it's quite chilly in this part of Chile, like 10-12C. Meant to rain this weekend but pick up next week. Mad to have been in an air-conditioned apartment in New York one day and then wrapping up with gloves and scarf in Santiago the next!